RIYADH, 3 June — A computer-education program for low-income and stranded Filipino workers rolled off on Saturday at the Philippine Overseas Labor Office in Riyadh, with 20 workers signing up for the 6-week course.
Conceptualized by Assistant Labor Attaché Jalilo dela Torre and now a major initiative of the POLO under Labor Attaché Jun Sodusta, the project aims to increase the productivity of OFWs, enhance their “employability,” and widen the base of computer-literate Filipinos in the Kingdom.
Trainees sponsored by POLO-registered Filipino associations will be grouped in the weekend sessions while stranded workers will take up the five-days-a-week crash course.
Module I will feature computer fundamentals, Windows XP Operating System, and Word 2000.
Excel 2000, Powerpoint 2000 and Publisher 2000 are covered under Module II. The advanced module will make the trainees choose one of the following: PC Assembly and Troubleshooting and Basic Networking; Internet and Web Design Fundamentals and Graphics Fundamentals; Database using Access 2000 and Visual Basic Fundamentals
The project was recently launched by Philippine Labor Secretary Patricia Sto Tomas during her visit to the Kingdom last week.
Trainors will be coming from the Computer Society of Filipinos (Comsofil), a Filipino community group of computer professionals, under the leadership of incumbent president Henry McCann and past president Noli Benavent.
Under the project, stranded workers are not required to pay the registration fee. But to help keep the project going, organizations have been asked to sponsor trainees at 100 riyals for every trainee per module.
Part of the registration fees will be donated to Barya Mo, Buhay Ko fund-raising drive for stranded workers, while some will be used to pay for the cost of training materials of stranded workers, said Assistant Labor Attaché dela Torre.
The project hopes to graduate at least 500 computer-proficient OFWs at the end of the year but because of its replication scheme in Phase II of the project, the number of beneficiaries is expected to multiply tenfold.
As a side course to the Megabyte project, a PC assembly crash course to run for four Fridays will open on June 21 also at the POLO.
The course will likewise feature troubleshooting and basic networking (peer-to-peer), with Comsofil trainors also being tapped for the job.
The Labor Office said only 30 slots will be made available and registration will be done on a first-com-first-served basis.
Interested parties may get in touch with Attaché dela Torre at tel. No. 480-8474, fax no. (01) 4832204, or via his e-mail address [email protected].
To accommodate nurses who want to get into the computer literacy act, a flexible schedule is being planned.
During a meeting with the community last Friday, the NaRS group headed by Ameurfina Silos pushed for a “floating training schedule” for nurses because of their broken work schedules.
POLO officials said if the nurses can come up with at least 20 participants, they can be fit into the regular weekday schedules for the stranded workers.
Instead of training for five days a week, dela Torre said, training hours can be lengthened but reduced to four days a week, from Saturday to Wednesday.
“We can then accommodate the floating schedule of the nurses and other allied professions, and even those walk-in who do not have a fixed work schedule,” he said.
Health workers who are interested in the course were told to contact Amie Silo or the POLO urgently so that their floating schedule could be finalized.
